Versions of Academic Freedom
From Professionalism to Revolution
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The author and New York Times columnist sheds light on the intersection of academia and politics with this look at the debate surrounding academic freedom.
Depending on who’s talking, academic freedom is an essential bulwark of democracy, an absurd fig leaf disguising liberal agendas, or, most often, some in-between muddle that both exaggerates its own importance and misunderstands its actual value to scholarship. The crucial question, Fish tells us, is located in the phrase itself: Do you emphasize “academic” or “freedom”?
Putting the stress on “academic” suggests a limited, professional freedom, while the conception of freedom implied by the latter could expand almost infinitely. Guided by that distinction, Fish analyzes various arguments for the value of academic freedom: Does it contribute to society’s common good? Does it authorize professors to critique the status quo, both inside and outside the university? Is it an engine of revolution? Are academics inherently different from other professionals? Or is academia just a job, and academic freedom merely a tool for doing that job?
No reader of Fish will be surprised by the deftness with which he dismantles weak arguments, corrects misconceptions, and clarifies muddy ideas. And while his conclusion may surprise, it is unquestionably bracing. Stripping away the mystifications that obscure academic freedom allows its beneficiaries to concentrate on what they should be doing: following their intellectual interests and furthering scholarship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his new treatise, Fish, a columnist for the New York Times and prominent public intellectual, tackles the question of academic freedom with his trademark incisiveness. Aiming to address two central questions how broadly should we interpret academic freedom? and what is truly at stake when we limit the latitude of critical inquiry? Fish first explores the role of academic in society through the lens of five basic schools of thought, which are placed them on a stratum from the most restrictive to the most permissive. Arguing for the most restrictive form, in which academic freedom should not be radical, but rather, radically limited, Fish defines academic freedom simply as the "unimpeded application of professional norms of inquiry." According to Fish, diminishing the notion of academic freedom to a purely professionalist value "is required if academic freedom is to mean something as opposed to meaning everything." In later chapters, Fish investigates the more permissive forms, surveying arguments that he unfailingly finds wanting from thinkers such as Judith Butler and Henry Giroux. Though Fish's defense of the professionalist school of thought and critiques of the more liberal conceptions of academic freedom are both impeccably expressed, one cannot help shaking the feeling that his arguments are largely academic made more in the spirit of how the academy should function than in reaction to what today's profit-oriented universities actually do.
